McArdle will be the first to claim a Romney Debate Victory when he blows a circuit in the first 15 minutes of the first debate when he gets asked about that video. And it will be the very first question asked.

McArdle will be the first to claim a Romney Debate Victory when he blows a circuit in the first 15 minutes of the first debate when he gets asked about that video. And it will be the very first question asked.

Sure, people claim that they find Mitt’s rant about crushing the 47% cockroaches to be “disgusting” and “unpresidential”, but the Unskewed Opinions site says that swing voters LOVE this stuff! Suck on that, libs!

The way this woman talks! She crab walks around her point in a weird passive-aggressive way. She means to say that the 47% sound bite will resound with people who don’t hate Romney yet (and that that is a good thing), but she can’t bring herself to make a positive assertion.

I dunno, I seriously think she’s right. Have you ever met a “swing voter”? They’re mostly animated by hatreds of other people and racial animus, and “47%” gives them the opportunity to hate on all the “lazy” people they know as well as the Welfare Queens.

My “swing voter” family thinks Mitt is right on, for instance (these are the same people who complain about “urban youths” sagging their pants and their friend of a cousin of a friend who “lives off disability” and drives a BMW)

@Corey: Ah yes, I know of these swing voters. One election they vote for the compassionate conservative. The next they swing to voting for the tough on terror candidate. The next they swing to voting for the maverick. Finally they swing to voting for full on teabaggers.

If someone is animated by racial animus and hatred of the ‘lazy’, and goes off about welfare / disability cheats and “”urban” “youths”” they’re not swing voters, they’re wingnuts. They were already voting for Rmoney.

Equally true: there is a non-zero chance that unemployment goes to 6% by the election, but it is such an insignificant percentage that rounding would put it at 0%. Same is true for McMuffin’s observation

@penpen: Like I said, have you ever met a “swing voter”? They’re politically ignorant, typically have no serious principles, and are easily swayed by appeals that make them sound like ubermenschen. Do you think any white “swing voter” hears Mitt’s 47% comments and identifies themselves as part of that group? No one’s going to consult their tax returns then say, wow, he was talking about me. No, they hear “47%” and think “black people” (people are wildly inaccurate about what percentage of the population minorities make up).

@Corey: I’ve run into people like that. The thing that always seems to work is pointing out who is in the 47%, and explaining that they still pay lots of other taxes. If that fails, ask them if they think military personnel in a combat zone are victims.

Do you think any white “swing voter” hears Mitt’s 47% comments and identifies themselves as part of that group? No one’s going to consult their tax returns then say, wow, he was talking about me. No, they hear “47%” and think “black people” (people are wildly inaccurate about what percentage of the population minorities make up).

I agree in general about your statement, that poorly informed white voters will generally think of non-whites as the moochers. However, Mitt’s 47% statement is so broad that it’s affecting people in a different way. People think of minorities as a smaller percentage of the population than 47%, because that’s damn near close to half and that’s far too scary for scared white people to contemplate (even if it’s true or going to be true). Therefore, when Mitt says 47% is kind of has to be including some white people.

If Mitt had said 30% or less, I think the comment would have worked for him, as egregious as it is. But he went too high with 47%. At that level people start looking around and thinking, “Wait…is he talking about me or my family?”

@Corey: ah, but if they’re that easily swayed by a one-off speech from last May, they’ll be just as easily swayed by a couple dozen other breezes that will blow through in the next 5 weeks. No net gain.

@Hill Dweller: Bush exudes warmth, wit, and charisma compared to Mitt Romney. Maybe Romney’s whole campaign was not intended to elect him president but to rehabilitate the Bush name so Jeb could run in 2016.

How does Dubya, who had what was easily one of the five worst presidencies in history, have a 46% approval rating?

@Hill Dweller: Nostalgia. I must admit that Bush was a far better campaigner, seems human instead of android, seems to be far less of an asshole, and had a hell of a lot more on the ball WRT governance than Romney has turned out to.

@Corey: Oh I hear you. I’m just curious how people that talk like that would ever find themselves swinging to the Democratic side. I guess maybe they could feel good voting for Dems after welfare reform.

@penpen: Because swing voters have no consistent principles, and vote on “gut” and “common sense”. Right now “common sense” says lazy welfare queens are getting high off the hog from Massa Obama’s largesse while the white man toils unappreciated. In 2008 “common sense” said “folks are hurting, and we should give someone else a chance”.

I can’t find it, but at some point in 2004 Chris Hayes wrote a long piece about canvassing swing voters in Ohio, where he really does a good job of explaining this dynamic. Swing voters have no consistent principles, don’t know what issues are “political” and which aren’t (many seemed to accept the outcomes of a policy process to be as inevitable as, say, the weather), and are very easily swayed by emotional appeals.

I approve of almost everything that Dubya has done in the last four years. I.e. acted embarrassed, and gone the fuck away…

@Greg: I’ll say this, and never thought I would as the man destroyed American democracy. I don’t think that was his specific intent, but it WAS the intent of those he chose to surround himself with, and he seemed OK with the results. For that, he cannot and should not be forgiven by the nation.

That being said, the way his party has treated him is unconscionable. He did everything they wanted. That it all blew up and fell down is not, strictly speaking, his fault, but the fault of the voters who put him in office expecting and wanting him to do things that would destroy democracy and the fabric of the nation. The people who voted for him got exactly what they wanted.

He got, in return, nothing but scorn and banishment for his efforts. Seems a pretty cruel way to treat somebody who gave you everything you asked for.

I do not think that GOP Republican aspirants have thought through some of the very negative consequences that winning the presidency could have on their post-presidential lives and legacies.

Pennsylvania used to have a grossly unfair tax based on your job title. Some people that made a lot of money paid nothing because their job title wasn’t on the list. The local government zeroed out the tax because they couldn’t get rid of it — that was a state function. The local school board sued, asserting that zero wasn’t a number.

You know, there are people all over this country doing actual useful work unrelated to politics, economics, or math, who could, in their spare, unpaid time, generate better analysis and commentary than that. It is a much bigger non-zero number of people, too.

Pretty sure her cooking segments and statements about food and food technology have discredited her on brussels sprouts by this point.
See: blenderella, how to make poisonous countertops, how to make cheese on rice, how she used to be vegetarian but did it wrong, hilariously wrong video cooking segments, etc.

Do you think any white “swing voter” hears Mitt’s 47% comments and identifies themselves as part of that group? No one’s going to consult their tax returns then say, wow, he was talking about me. No, they hear “47%” and think “black people” (people are wildly inaccurate about what percentage of the population minorities make up).

If they heard it from Sarah Palin or Rick Santorum, sure. But one of the things that makes Mitt such a great candidate (to run against) is that he makes you absolutely believe that he holds poor/working class white people in contempt, too.

I suspect Megan is also pretending that “swing voter” = “independent voter”, which has been proven to be nonsense. Polls this year have shown that most “independents” now are Republicans who don’t want to be called Republicans.

“swing voter” = Republican but embarrassed about it
“independent” = Republican but embarrassed about it
“voted for Clinton, Rs ever since” = Republican but embarrassed about it
“hate politics” = Republican but embarrassed about it
“socially liberal, fiscally conservative” = Republican but embarrassed about it
“b-b-but the deficit” = Republican but embarrassed about it
“I hate both parties” = Republican but embarrassed about it

Megan should teach us a lesson by making sure each one of her columns between now and November 6 is about the winning message shared in the 47% video.

Each column should include a link to the actual video so as best to claim all the advantages of the non-zero chance that swing voters will be charmed thereby and virtually compelled to cast a proud vote for Mitt.

But only if Megan has the courage of her convictions, and isn’t some kind of weak-kneed RINO for whom Ayn Rand would have shown nothing but contempt.

Megan…..oh my…. We could point and laugh but then there’s Jen Rubin and the whole Fox victims unit and it goes on and on. And these are the ‘reasonable’ crazies as was pointed out earlier.

If Buckley was alive today what would he say? I mean, I know he was the secret (openly secret) racist of the thinking conservatives but you’d have to think the intellect of those on his side doing the lifting would cause him to comment. What would he have said?

I am surprised that there is not more discussion today about John Sununu’s remark’s yesterday. He said, “Look, an administration as a whole is responsible for what happens on its watch, unless he wants to tell us that the buck doesn’t stop there.”

He is making Bush responsible for 9/11 and Reagan responsible for the 241 American deaths in the Marine barracks attack in Lebanon in 1983.

This is something I’ve never even heard implied by a Republican, but Sununu went there. Wow!

Intellectually I know that the first “Annie” on Broadway was ANDREA McArdle. But every time I hear Megan’s name, my brain starts playing “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow” which I loathe, and then I lose all focus on whatever the person was quoting from her.

So what were you saying? Oh yes. Perhaps she is merely a highly trained mathematician and she is making a rigorous mathematical statement. It is also true that there is a non-zero probability that all the air molecules in the room will be on the left half and you’ll suffocate. You can calculate it and it isn’t zero. That doesn’t mean you should worry about it.

I think what the 47% remark has done is to freeze a portion of leaning voters. Undecideds, like Independents, are pretty much emabarrassed to admit a Party affilliation even though they lean toward one or the other. Undecideds are not the same group as the “Won’t Vote” crowd who figure it doesn’t matter – they’re the “I Should Vote” but they don’t want to be “One Of Those.” Despite inattention they do absorb some info and lean but they just don’t want to admit it.

I don’t think the 47% thing was a nuke to r-Money, I think it was a final freeze point to a dropping temperature. The ones who won’t admit where they want to go still need to either not be further alienated or given a gentle push to seal the deal. I know it is a lot of fun to “Undecided = Emabarrassed GOPer” but if it were true there wouldn’t have been any Dem Prez or many Sen or House members.

There are some damn good reasons why the percentage of Undecideds is so small this election – a lot of freezing has been done for more reasons than space allows. I won’t bet anything I care about, but if Obama doesn’t step on a landmine I’d call the current Undecideds an even split at election or slightly r-Money. (challenger/under-dog)

@John PM: She’s trying to say, in a pseudo-intellectual glibertarian sort of way, that the 47% tape isn’t as bad as Dems think it is. That’s different from the message that she’s sending (again), which is: I’m a utterly shameless hack.

I dropped a comment on one of her essays yesterday and then never went back to see what everyone else said.

It was a reference to a strange little study that pretended that Social Security was responsible for the dropping birth rate throughout the latter half of the 20th Century. I pointed out that the dropping birth rate had a lot to do with improved infant mortality rates and with not having to have 10 children so that at least 8 could survive to support you in your old age, and did we really want to go back to that time.

For what it’s worth, I’ve met a lot of “don’t care about politics/don’t have a party” people who would likely be Democrats if they did give a damn. People who are really on the far right don’t bother hiding it, because they assume everybody thinks like them and generally have less shame than the average person. Maybe I’m just weird, but I know very, very few people who conform to the “Say I’m independent but I’m really a hardcore Republican” model. I think they’re concentrated in a few Manhattan and DC-area zip codes.

My Big Theory about politics is that the percentage of people in the country as a whole who actually believe and are willing to fight for the far right is smaller than anyone thinks. If we could mobilize and use all the energy from the large majority (I’m thinking 70-75% of the country here) people who are on the other side, the far right would be blown out of the water. The problem is, a lot of those people not only don’t care about politics, but have a mental block on making themselves care. I would argue that doesn’t make them bad people, just not educated.